Straight No Chaser - A Jazz Show

50 Years Ago Today: The Duke Catches a Trane in Jersey

Straight No Chaser is the place for jazz lovers (and those who will soon be jazz lovers) to enjoy podcasts with their favorite music and artists. Winner of the 2017 JazzTimes Readers' Poll for Best Podcast, your host Jeffrey Siegel will take you inside the world of jazz, from the new releases to the best festiva;s to remembrances of jazz legends.

It's a question that jazz fans had to ponder. Why did the
venerable Duke Ellington decide to record a session with John
"Sheets of Sound" Coltrane? Fifty years ago to day they met at Rudy
Van Gelder Studios, in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, to record tracks that
would become an Impulse! Records releae early the next year.

The Duke had been recording collaborative albums for the first
few years of the decade, including small group sessions with
Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, and most importantly, Charles
Mingus and Max Roach (Money Jungle). Into his
sixties, Ellington needed some of the cache that hot young players
might provide to keep being relevant to a younger jazz
audience.

As for Coltrane, always one to honor his elders, it was likely
an opportunity he couldn't pass up. He brought members of what had
just become his Classic Quartet, and had Jimmy Garrison (bass) and
Elvin Jones (drums) join him with the Duke. In the CD booklet,
Coltrane would say:

"I was really honoured to have the opportunity of working
with Duke. It was a wonderful experience. He has set standards I
haven't caught up with yet. I would have liked to have worked over
all those numbers again, but then I guess the performances wouldn't
have had the same spontaneity. And they mightn't have been any
better!"

Click here to listen to the quartet play "Take the
Coltrane", a song writen by Ellington's right hand man, Billy
Strayhorn.